Creeping Bentgrass Christmassy Car Club Concert!

Thursday 14 December 2017. All awash with alliteration, no... that's it. I'm not going to be able to keep that up... Thursday night saw us battling torrential rain and hail in Fleetwood as we set up in the Cricket Club to perform at the Christmas Party of a local Classics Car Club.

We have played for this club several times in the past and strangely, whenever prizes for the best car are handed out, the judges have always managed to overlook my Mazda... However, no prizes tonight as the order of the day is to celebrate Christmas and have a party!

I'm trying out my new American Professional Fender Stratocaster for the first time at a gig tonight and it sounds lovely and is a perfect match for the old faithful cherry red guitar.

A surprise visit from Father and Mrs Christmas and... surely that's not a reindeer...!

Guitars Through The Years

A new guitar made its way into my possession recently after much drooling and looking pleadingly at Miss Franny. So when I popped a couple of photos onto Flickr and Facebook someone asked me how many guitars I'd had and what was the first.

Ah... embarrassing... The twelve-year-old me in 1966 with a guitar that my Dad made from scratch. The frets were OO gauge model railway lines. The measurements were all taken from an old acoustic guitar and the cable plugged into the guitar with a TV aerial co-axial socket. But it worked!

Four years later and I was still using the acoustic guitar. It needed a 2p piece to keep the bridge from falling out, but it came with me on those first gigs!

I don't have any photos of the next guitar which was a Commodore electric guitar.

Hey... is that one cool dude, ladies? I was 18 and had a matching pair of Eko guitars - a 6-string and a 12-string. Hang on... who laughed? Own up!!!

I kept the 6-string but in 1973 I traded the 12-string for a second hand Sumbro Stratocaster copy. I had no FX pedals so playing it was disappointing, but I still have it and it has appeared on stage with Creeping Bentgrass a few times when I've been feeling nostalgic. Every time I vow not to feel nostalgic again...

I can't remember when I sold the 6-string, but much later I bought another acoustic which featured on very early Creeping Bentgrass gigs when we were a 4-piece and playing mainly folk songs.

It was joined by a Les Paul copy which was beautiful but the wide neck caused RSI and I had to go back to the Sumbro for electric stuff.

Even having the warped neck of the guitar straightened didn't endear it to me so in 2002 I bought the ice blue Fender Strat. Oh, did it feel good!

And so I had to have a back up didn't I? In the early Creeping Bentgrass days I was a bit heavy handed and used to bust the occasional string. Re-stringing a Strat on stage took too long so a backup meant I could just swap guitars. This was an American Standard Strat and became my main instrument.

This was a whim and a bad one... It looks great and sounds ok but for a buzzing fret. A much used fret... Which makes it unusable. It would repair but I can't be bothered.

And then just before Christmas I saw this Fender Special Edition Stratocaster which started the drooling process mentioned above! Miss Franny got fed up with me after a while and said (rather crossly I thought...) "Oh just buy it!"

You know, I was going to think about it, but somehow it just arrived...

(Miss Franny at this point has pointed out that she was sweetness and light itself and that this is a dreadful and unwarranted slur. I am happy to publish this unreserved apology and have come to a mutual agreement for damages which she will fritter away on something nowhere near as exciting as musical instrumentation. Er... to me, that is...)

CBG in Catforth

Last night Creeping Bentgrass played a social "Dance Nite" at Catforth Village Hall. My SatNav tried to take us down a dead end again. Luckily we recognised it as one that we tried before, having to turn back when it became a rut and yawning chasm-filled dirt track. Instead we did a somewhat circuitous route to get there... The journey back was much quicker as we decided to ignore the SatNav!

We set off with the usual country and folk sets to an enthusiastic audience. As the hall warmed up (literally), a couple of balloons exploded quite spectacularly close by my head - talk about playing under fire...!

We had a break whilst a hotpot supper was served and then came back complete with sparkly ties to play through the late 50s and 60s sets and a selection of smoochy ballads for dances "in hold" as David described it...

A great night with plenty of folk on the dance floor and lots of happy faces singing along at the tables.

We usually play for around 3 and a half to four hours on such nights and lots of friends ask how we can play so long.

Well if you play guitar regularly you just build up corn on the ends of your fingers and although some of it wears off after a full night's playing, as witness last night's photo of my fingers, it doesn't hurt any more than feeling a little tender and this morning my fingers are back to normal again.

The next gig is the annual Billy Fury bash in Northampton in a fortnight. Looking forward to that!!!

First Guitar

A lot of people ask me how long I've been playing guitar and I can nail it down to the day.

This is Christmas Day 1965. I was 11 and am on the right of the photograph with my parents and brother Frank on the left. The electric guitar was made by my Dad from scratch. The acoustic guitar had been rescued from someone's coal bunker and Dad measured it to provide the details to build the electric guitar. Consequently it has all the parts of an acoustic and the neck is shorter than an electric should be but to our eyes at that time, it was wonderful! The frets were actually made from Hornby Dublo model railway lines and instead of a standard jack socket it had a television aerial socket but these were the two guitars I learned to play on. Explains a lot... (just thought I'd get it in first...)

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